Hand said he was “impressed” by McIntyre’s statistical work. But whereas McIntyre claims that Mann’s methods have “created” the hockey stick from data that does not contain it, Hand agrees with Mann: he too says that the hockey stick – showing an above-average rise in temperatures during the 20th century – is there. The upward incline is just shorter than Mann’s original graphic suggests. “More like a field-hockey stick than an ice-hockey stick,” he told New Scientist.

While I appreciate the compliment, I wonder what authority Hand has for his assertion that I claimed “Mann’s methods have “created” the hockey stick from data that does not contain it” – this is obviously untrue. The Mann data set obviously contains the hockey-stick shaped Graybill bristlecone pine data sets – I’ve talked at length about bristlecone pines as every CA reader knows. Had the Oxburgh Inquiry bothered to ask me, I would have been happy to clarify this point for them.

Hand says that the shape is more like “a field-hockey stick than an ice-hockey stick” – wonder how he knows that.

1) If I think it is wrong for scientists to refuse to share data (i.e. refuse to subject their work to the essence of the scientific method), wrong to encourage each other to break the law, wrong to produced biased reports, wrong to use corrupted data, etc, etc,

2) And evidence exists which clearly proves that scientists have done these and a lot of other things that are ethically improper,

3) Are the ethical improprieties no longer ‘improper’, if the scientists’ friends convene a panel which announces that there is nothing wrong with what they did?

Is that what I am supposed to believe? It’s as if we are being asked — “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

Hand says that the shape is more like “a field-hockey stick than an ice-hockey stick” – wonder how he knows that.

Perhaps he meant that if you leave off the instrumental data that always overlays the HS, the HS per se doesn’t have much of a blade, and in particular does not exceed even the understated MBH 95% CI’s. See TAR SPM p. 1.

(Of course, as UC has shown on CA, the smoothed TAR HS must have been generated using instrumental endpadding, but even that illegimately smoothed series does not have much rise in it. Not to mention the data and PCA problems.)

‘Hand agrees with Mann: he too says that the hockey stick – showing an above-average rise in temperatures during the 20th century – is there’

It’s not even the end of the stick that is the main issue – more the shaft of the stick that ignore’s the MWP, making these latter temperatures ‘unprecedented’, therefore ‘clearly’ attributable to AGW.

Perhaps an email to Prof. Hand would be in order. On what basis is he making his hockey stick statement? And he is missing the point. After all, the shape of the blade is not the big issue, it’s the flatness of the handle.

Considering a field hockey stick fails the vertical line test, I would hope Hand is simply trying to be funny.

It would indeed be fun to pursue that line of thought, that it will get so hot in the future that temperatures will double back on themselves and makes us hotter last year than it actually was. What a learned Hand.

Prof Hand said many of the reproductions of the graph do not make clear when these different sets of data are used.
“It is only misleading in the sense they merged two different things,” he said.

I wonder what the journalist chopped off that sentence?

“It is only misleading in the sense they merged two different things,”

It probably went something like this:

‘….for example, if one were to plot the value of your newspaper versus time, then merge in the price of an internet company after a certain date, in order to mask a decline in the value of your paper, that might be considered misleading in a financial sense. In climatology such manipulations are simply called tricks.’

He [Hand] said the graph, that showed global temperature records going back 1,000 years, was exaggerated – although any reproduction using improved techniques is likely to also show a sharp rise in global warming. He agreed the graph would be more like a field hockey stick than the ice hockey blade it was originally compared to.

“The particular technique they used exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick. Had they used an appropriate technique the size of the blade of the hockey stick would have been smaller,” he said. “The change in temperature is not as great over the 20th century compared to the past as suggested by the Mann paper

The important part of the hockey stick is not the blade. It is the flat shaft which discounts the MWP. The flat shaft is what makes the current warm period “unprecedented” in a 1000 years. it doesn’t matter if the shape is of the form of a field or ice hockey stick. The shaft is flat in both of them and that is what counts.

And since the blade is produced using thermometer readings, I find this statement puzzling.

Agree about Dr. Mann’s complete mis-characterization/lie about Dr. Bloomfield’s comments. But recall that Bloomfield’s specific and candid comment(s) agreeing with Dr. Wegman’s statistical criticism of Mann etc, were made under cross-examination; he started out at worst, whitewashing Mann’s work in his testimony.

What is it called when a person inserts a claim that is in no way related to the task at hand or makes claims based on hand picked data? Does the term RED HERRING apply. Or would Cherry Picking be a better description.

This post summarizes the state of climate science. A says there is a hockey stick. B says the hockey stick is a kind of principal component fiction. C says there is a hockey stick but not as long as A says. Interminable arguments about the validity the magnitude the existence or non existence of data, tree rings, temperatures, ice cores, proxies. Ad infinitum.

Does anyone remember the original question? No? It concerns man made CO2’s effect on the climate. It is the intellectual poverty of climate science that almost everyone talks about data and its manipulation. Few if any about what actually maters.

Steve writes “While I appreciate the compliment, I wonder what authority Hand has for his assertion that I claimed “Mann’s methods have “created” the hockey stick from data that does not contain it” – this is obviously untrue.”

I have read somewhere on this blog that one of Mann’s programs outputs a hockey stick shaped result regardless of what data is fed into it. Was that comment by Steve? I thought so. It seems that this is what Hand refers to.